Saturday, November 28, 2015

Donald Trump May Not Be a Fascist, But He is Leading Us Merrily Down That Path

People who have studied the extremist right as a historical
and sociopolitical phenomenon in depth are acutely aware of a simple truth:
America has been very, very lucky so far when it comes to fascistic political
movements.

And now, with the arrival of the Donald Trump 2016 phenomenon,
that luck may be about to run out.

Nor is this phenomenon just a flash in the pan. Trump is the
logical end result of an endless series of assaults on not just American
liberalism, but on democratic institutions themselves, by the American right
for many years. It is the long-term creep of radicalization of the right come
home to roost.

Fascistic elements and tendencies have always been part of
America’s DNA. Indeed, it can be said that some of the worst traits of fascism
in Europe were borrowed from their American exemplars – particularly the
eliminationist tendencies, manifested first in the form of racial and ethnic
segregation, and ultimately in genocidal violence.

Despite the long-running presence of these elements, though,
America has never yet given way to fascism. No doubt some of this, in the past
half-century at least, was primarily fueled by the natural human recoil that
occurred when we got to witness the end result of these tendencies when given
the chance to rule by someone like Hitler – namely, the Holocaust. We learned
to be appalled by racial and ethnic hatred, by segregation and eliminationism,
because we saw the pile of corpses that they produced, and fled in terror.

Those of us who study fascism not just as a historical
phenomenon, but as a living and breathing phenomenon that has always previously
maintained a kind of half-life on the fringes of the American right, have come
to understand that it is both a complex and a simple phenomenon: in one sense,
it resembles a dynamic human psychological pathology in that it’s comprised of
a complex constellation of traits that are interconnected and whose presence
and importance rise and fall according to the stages of development it goes
through; and in another, it can in many ways be boiled down to the raw, almost
feral imposition of the organized violent will of an angry and fear-ridden human
id upon the rest of humankind.

That’s where Donald Trump comes in.

In many ways, Trump’s fascistic-seeming presidential
campaign fills in many of the components of that complex constellation of
traits that comprises real fascism. Perhaps the most significant of these is
the one component that has been utterly missing previously in American forms of
fascism: the charismatic leader around whom the fascist troops can rally, the
one who voices their frustrations and garners followers like flies.

Scholars of fascist politics have remarked previously that
America has been fortunate for most of its history not to have had such a
figure rise out of the ranks of their fascist movements. And in the case of
Donald Trump, that remains true – he has no background or history as a white
supremacist or proto-fascist, nor does he actually express their ideologies.

Rather, what he is doing is mustering the latent fascist
tendencies in American politics – some of it overtly white supremacist, while
the majority of it is the structural racism and white privilege that springs
from the nation’s extensive white-supremacist historical foundations – on his
own behalf. He is merrily leading us down the path towards a fascist state even
without being himself an overt fascist.

The reality that Trump is not a bona fide fascist himself
does not make him any less dangerous. In some ways, it makes him more so,
because it disguises the swastika looming in the shadow of the flamboyant
orange hair. It camouflages the throng of ravening wolves he’s riding in upon.

And they have a valid point, because Trump fills out so many
of the key components that collectively create genuine fascism. And while it’s
true that, as Josh
Marshall suggests, there really is no single, agreed-upon definition of
fascism, there’s also no doubt that we can grasp the idea of fascism not just
by studying its history, but also by examining the various attempts at
understanding and defining just what comprises fascism. And in doing so, we can
recognize exactly what it is that Trump is doing.

For one thing, as Berlet explains: “When Mussolini wrote
about corporatism, he was not writing about modern commercial corporations. He
was writing about a form of vertical syndicalist corporatism based on early
guilds.” The Skeptical
Libertarian explains that the term “corporatism” and “corporate” meant an
entirely different thing in 1920s Italy than it means today:

“Corporations” were not individual businesses. Under fascist corporatism,
sectors of the economy were divided into corporate groups, whose activities and
interactions were managed and coordinated by the government. The idea was to
split the difference between socialism and laissez faire capitalism, letting
the state control and direct the economy from the top-down without itself
owning the means of production.

… The bottom line is that corporate
groups meant classes of people in the economy, which were allegedly represented
through appointments to the Council. The system was not about welfare for
private companies, but rather about totalitarian central planning of the whole
economy through legislation and regulation. Corporatism meant formally
“incorporating” divergent interests under the state, which would resolve their
differences through regulatory mechanisms.

Moreover, as Berlet explains, this fake definition of
fascism directly contradicts many of the things that Mussolini himself did in
fact write about the nature of fascism. If he or Gentile ever did actually say
it, it’s likely it was a bit of propaganda intended to ease and mislead
business-minded followers.

Another thing that fascism decidedly is NOT is the grotesque distortion made by
Jonah Goldberg, to wit, that fascism is a kind of socialism and therefore
“properly understood as a phenomenon of the left.” This claim, in fact, is such
a travesty of the idea of fascism that it functionally negates its meaning,
rendering it, as George Orwell might describe it, a form of Newspeak. Indeed,
it was Orwell
himself who wrote that “the idea underlying Fascism is irreconcilably
different from that which underlies Socialism. Socialism aims, ultimately, at a
world-state of free and equal human beings. It takes the equality of human
rights for granted. Nazism assumes just the opposite.”

Fascism, in reality, is a much more complex phenomenon than either of these
definitions. Let’s look, by way of example, at some of the more recent efforts
at defining it:

Stanley Payne, in Fascism:
Comparison and Definition (1980):

A. The Fascist
Negations:
-- Antiliberalism
-- Anticommunism
-- Anticonservatism (though with the understanding that fascist groups were
willing to undertake temporary alliances with groups from any other sector,
most commonly with the right)

B. Ideology and Goals:
-- Creation of a new nationalist authoritarian state based not merely on
traditional principles or models
-- Organization of some new kind of regulated, multiclass, integrated national
economic structure, whether called national corporatist, national socialist, or
national syndicalist
-- The goal of empire or a radical change in the nation’s relationship with
other powers
-- Specific espousal of an idealist, voluntarist creed, normally involving the
attempt to realize a new form of modern, self-determined, secular culture

C. Style and Organization:
-- Emphasis on esthetic structure of meetings, symbols, and political
choreography, stressing romantic and mystical aspects
-- Attempted mass mobilization with militarization of political relationships
and style and with the goal of a mass party militia
-- Positive evaluation and use of, or willingness to use, violence
-- Extreme stress on the masculine principle and male dominance, while
espousing the organic view of society
-- Exaltation of youth above other phases of life, emphasizing the conflict of
generations, at least in effecting the initial political transformation
-- Specific tendency toward an authoritarian, charismatic, personal style of
command, whether or not the command is to some degree initially elective

Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism, p. 218:

Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive
preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by
compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of
committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration
with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with
redemptive violence and without ethical or legal constraints goals of internal
cleansing and external expansion.

Paxton's nine "mobilizing passions" of fascism:

-- a sense of overwhelming crisis beyond the reach of any traditional
solutions;

-- the primacy of the group, toward which one has duties superior to every
right, whether universal or individual, and the subordination of the individual
to it;

-- the belief that one's group is a victim, a sentiment which justifies any
action, without legal or moral limits, against the group's enemies, both
internal and external;

-- dread of the group's decline under the corrosive effect of individualistic
liberalism, class conflict, and alien influences;

-- the need for closer integration of a purer community, by consent if
possible, or by exclusionary violence if necessary;

-- the need for authority by natural leaders (always male), culminating in a
national chief who alone is capable of incarnating the group's destiny;

-- the superiority of the leader's instincts over abstract and universal
reason;

-- the beauty of violence and the efficacy of will, when they are devoted to
the group's success;

-- the right of the chosen people to dominate others without restraint from any
kind of human or divine law, right being decided by the sole criterion of the
group's prowess in a Darwinian struggle.

Fascism: modern political ideology that seeks to regenerate the social,
economic, and cultural life of a country by basing it on a heightened sense of
national belonging or ethnic identity. Fascism rejects liberal ideas such as
freedom and individual rights, and often presses for the destruction of
elections, legislatures, and other elements of democracy. Despite the
idealistic goals of fascism, attempts to build fascist societies have led to
wars and persecutions that caused millions of deaths. As a result, fascism is
strongly associated with right-wing fanaticism, racism, totalitarianism, and
violence.

To these I would add one other important component, taken
from Harald Oftstad’s Our Contempt for
Weakness: Nazi Norms and Values – And Our Own (1989), namely, the logical
extension of the Darwinian struggle against the “lesser” that pervades so much
fascist literature: the deep-seated hatred and contempt in which all persons
deemed “weaker” (be this ethnic, racial, medical, genetic, or otherwise) are
held, and the desire to eliminate them entirely that it fuels.

In Hitler’s own words:

The stronger must dominate and not
blend with the weaker, thus sacrificing his own greatness. Only the born
weakling can view this as cruel, but he after all is only a weak and limited
man; for if this law did not prevail, any conceivable higher development of
organic living beings would be unthinkable.

… [We will try to] “save” even the
weakest and most sickly at any price, and this plants the seed of a future
generation which must inevitably grow more and more deplorable the longer this
mockery of Nature and her will continues. [Mein
Kampf]

1.Eliminationist
rhetoric is the backbone of Trump’s appeal. His opening salvo in the
campaign – the one that first skyrocketed him to the forefront in the race,
poll-wise, and proved wildly popular with
Republican voters – was his vow (and subsequent proposed program) to deport all 12
million of the United States’ undocumented immigrants (using, of course,
the deprecatory term “illegal alien”) and to erect a gigantic wall on the
nation’s southern border. Significantly, the language
he used to justify such plans – labeling those immigrants “criminals,”
“killers,” and “rapists,” contending that they bring crime and disease – is
classic rhetoric designed to demonize an entire class of people by reducing
them to objects fit only for elimination.

2.The
palingenetic ultranationalism. After the race-baiting and the ethnic
fearmongering, this is the most obviously fascistic component of Trump’s
presidential election effort, embodied in those trucker hats proclaiming: “Make
America Great Again.” (Trump himself puts itthis way: "The silent majority is back, and we’re going to take the
country back. We're going to make America great again."

That’s almost the letter-perfect embodiment of palingenesis – that is, the myth
of the phoenix-like rebirth from the ashes of an entire society in its “golden
age.” In the meantime, Trump’s nationalism is evident not just in these
statement but are the entire context of his rants against Latino immigrants and
Syrian refugees.

3.Trump’s
deep contempt not just for liberalism (which provides most of the fuel for
his xenophobic rants, particularly against the media) but also
for establishment conservatism. Trump’s biggest fan, Rush Limbaugh, boasts:
“In parlaying this outsider status of his, he’s better at playing the insiders’
game than they are, and they are insiders. He’s running rings around all of
these seasoned, lifelong, highly acclaimed professionals in both the consultant
class, the adviser class, the strategist class, and the candidate class. And
he’s doing it simply by being himself.”

4.Trump
constantly proclaims America
to be in a state of crisis that has made it “the laughingstock” of the
rest of the world, and proclaims that this has occurred because of the failures
of (primarily liberal) politicianss.

5.He
himself embodies the fascist insistence upon male leadership by a man of
destiny, and his refusal to acknowledge factual evidence of the falsity of many
of his proclamations and comments embodies the fascistic notion that the
leader’s instincts trump logic and reason in any event.

This list could probably go on all day. But eventually, as we consider
the attributes of real fascism, we also can begin to discern the difference
between that phenomenon and the Trump candidacy.

Fascists have, in the past, always relied upon an
independent, movement-driven paramilitary force capable of enacting various
forms of thuggery on their opponents (as in the Italian Blackshirts, aka the Milizia
Volontaria per la Sicurezza Nazionale, and the German Brownshirts, the Sturmabteilung).
Trump, however, has no such force at his disposal.

What Trump does have
is the avid support not only of various
white-supremacist organizations, as well as that of very real paramilitary
organizations in the form of the Oath
Keepers and the “III
Percent” movement, many of whose members are avid Trump backers, but
neither of which have explicitly endorsed him. Moreover, Trump has never
referenced any desire to form an alliance or to make use of such paramilitary
forces.

That’s a clearly fascistic response. It also helps us
understand why Trump is an extraordinarily dangerous right-wing populist
demagogue, and not a genuine, in-the-flesh fascist.

A serious fascist would have called upon not just the crowd
to respond with violence, but also his paramilitary allies to respond with
retaliatory strikes. Trump didn’t do that.

That, in a tiny nutshell, is an example of the problem with
Trump’s fascism: He is not really an ideologue, acting out of a rigid adherence
to a consistent worldview, as all fascists are. Trump’s only real ideology is the
Worship of the Donald, and he will do and say anything that appeals to the
lowest common denominator of the American body politic in order to attract
their support – the nation’s id, the near-feral segment that breathes and lives
on fear and paranoia and hatred.

There’s no question these supporters bring a singular,
visceral energy to the limited universe of the GOP primary, though I don’t know
anyone who expects that such a campaign can survive the oxygen and exposure of
a general election. Indeed, it is in many signs an indication of the doom that
is descending upon a Republican Party in freefall, flailing about in a death
spiral, that it is finally resorting to a campaign as nakedly fascistic as
Trump’s in its attempts to secure the presidency.

This is why Trump has never called upon the shock troops of
a paramilitary wing for support, and why he has always kept an arm’s-length
distance from the white nationalists and neo-Nazis who have become some
of his most enthusiastic backers. He isn’t really one of them.

What he is, as Berlet has explained elsewhere, is a
classic right-wing nativist populist demagogue: “His ideology and rhetoric
are much more comparable to the European populist radical right, akin to
Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front, the Danish People’s Party or Vladimir
Zhirinovsky’s Liberal Democratic Party of Russia. All of them use the common
radical right rhetoric of nativism, authoritarianism and populism.”

Of course, it’s also important to understand that fascism,
in fact, is a subspecies of right-wing populism, very similar to the Klan in nature
– that is, its malignant, metastasized version, crazed in its insatiable lust
for power, fueled by fear and hatred, and fed by the blood of its vulnerable
targets.

Trump is not fascist primarily because he lacks any
kind of coherent, or even semi-coherent, ideology. What he represents instead
is the kind of id-driven feral politics common to the radical right, a sort of
gut-level reactionarism that lacks the rigor and absolutism, the demand for
ideological purity, that are characteristic of full-bore fascism.

That does not, however, mean he is any less dangerous to
American democracy. Indeed, he may be more dangerous than an outright fascist,
who would in reality be far less appealing and far less likely to succeed in
the current milieu. What Trump is doing, by exploiting the strands of
right-wing populism in the country, is making the large and growing body of
proto-fascists in America larger and even more vicious – that is, he is
creating the conditions that could easily lead to a genuine and potentially
irrevocable outbreak of fascism.

Recall, if you will, the lessons of Milton Mayer in his
book, They Thought They Were Free: The
Germans 1933-1945 – namely, the way these changes happen not overnight, but
incrementally, like the legendary slow boiling of frogs:

"You see," my colleague
went on, "one doesn’t see exactly where or how to move. Believe me, this
is true. Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little
worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking
occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in
resisting somehow. You don’t want to act, or even talk, alone; you don’t want
to ‘go out of your way to make trouble.’ Why not?—Well, you are not in the
habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that
restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty.

… "But the one great shocking
occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes.
That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come
immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have
been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had
come immediately after the ‘German Firm’ stickers on the windows of non-Jewish
shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all
the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them
preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than
Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C?
And so on to Step D.

"And one day, too late, your
principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden
of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my
little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘Jewish swine,’ collapses it all at
once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed
completely under your nose. The world you live in—your nation, your people—is
not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched,
all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the
concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed
because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is
changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and
fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is
transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even
to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in
order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.”

It is by small steps of incremental meanness and viciousness
that we lose our humanity. The Nazis, in the end, embodied the ascension of
utter demonic inhumanity, but they didn't get that way overnight. They got that
way through, day after day, attacking and demonizing and urging the elimination
of those they deemed their enemies.

And this is what has been happening to America – in
particular, to the conservative movement and the Republican Party – for a very
long time. Donald Trump represents the apotheosis of this, the culmination of a
very long-growing trend that really began in the 1990s.

That was when we first saw the
popular rise of eliminationist hate talk, wielded with thoughtless glee and
great regularity by an increasingly rabid set of right-wing pundits led by Rush
Limbaugh, and then deeply codified by the talking heads who have subsequently
marched across the sound stages at Fox News. It rose to the surface with the
vice-presidential candidacy of Sarah
Palin in 2008, followed immediately, in reaction to the election of Barack
Obama, by
the birth of the Tea Party, which is perhaps the single most significant
manifestation of right-wing populism in the nation’s history.

Trump aligned himself very early with the Tea Party
elements, remarking
in 2011 that “I represent a lot of the ingredients of the Tea Party.” And
indeed he does – in particular, with its obeisance to the
captains of industry and their untrammeled right to make profits at the expense
of everyone else.

This is a phenomenon known as
Producerism, and it is one of the hallmarks of right-wing populism. It's
accurately defined in
Wikipedia as:

a syncretic ideology
of populist economic nationalism which holds that the productive forces of
society - the ordinary worker, the small businessman, and the entrepreneur, are
being held back by parasitical elements at both the top and bottom of the
social structure.

... Producerism sees society's strength being "drained from both
ends"--from the top by the machinations of globalized financial capital
and the large, politically connected corporations which together conspire to
restrict free enterprise, avoid taxes and destroy the fortunes of the honest
businessman, and from the bottom by members of the underclass and illegal
immigrants whose reliance on welfare and government benefits drains the
strength of the nation. Consequently, nativist rhetoric is central to modern
Producerism. Illegal immigrants are viewed as a threat to the prosperity of the
middle class, a drain on social services, and as a vanguard of globalization
that threatens to destroy national identities and sovereignty. Some advocates
of producerism go further, taking a similar position on legal immigration.

In the United States, Producerists are distrustful of both major political
parties. The Republican Party is rejected for its support of corrupt Big
Business and the Democratic Party for its advocacy of the unproductive lazy
waiting for their entitlement handouts (Kazin, Stock, Berlet & Lyons).

Berlet has written
extensively about the long historical association of producerism with
oppressive right-wing movements and regimes:

Producerism begins in
the U.S. with the Jacksonians, who wove together intra-elite factionalism and
lower-class Whites’ double-edged resentments. Producerism became a staple of
repressive populist ideology. Producerism sought to rally the middle strata
together with certain sections of the elite. Specifically, it championed the
so-called producing classes (including White farmers, laborers, artisans,
slaveowning planters, and “productive” capitalists) against “unproductive”
bankers, speculators, and monopolists above—and people of color below. After
the Jacksonian era, producerism was a central tenet of the anti-Chinese crusade
in the late nineteenth century. In the 1920s industrial philosophy of Henry
Ford, and Father Coughlin’s fascist doctrine in the 1930s, producerism fused
with antisemitic attacks against “parasitic” Jews.

The Producerist narrative is why Henry Ford – who, as the ostensible author of The International Jew, a 1920 conspiracist tome that
inspired Hitler’s paranoia, and whose capital later helped build the Nazi war
machine in the 1930s, was also (and not coincidentally) perhaps the ultimate
American enabler of fascism – is such a seminal figure for American right-wing
populists, both as a leader in the 1920s and ‘30s, as well as a figure of
reverence today. (Glenn Beck, in fact, on several occasions on his old Fox News
show referenced
Ford as something of a holy figure for his efforts to resist FDR’s New Deal
in the 1930s.) The same narrative is also why, in today’s context, Ayn Rand and
Atlas Shrugged – a tendentious
novel speculating on the disasters that would befall the world if its great
industrial leaders suddenly chose to stop producing – are so important in their
mythology.

Right-wing populism is essentially predicated on what today we might call the
psychology of celebrity-worship: convincing working-class schlubs that they too
can someday become rich and famous -- because when they do, would they want to
be taxed heavily? It's all about dangling that lottery carrot out there for the
poor stiffs who were never any good at math to begin with, and more than eager
to delude themselves about their chances of hitting the jackpot.

The thing about right-wing populism is that it’s manifestly self-defeating:
those who stand to primarily benefit from this ideology are the wealthy, which
is why they so willingly underwrite it. It might, in fact, more accurately be
called "sucker populism."

Nonetheless, right-wing populists have long been part of the larger
conservative movement – though largely relegated to its fringes. Some of the
more virulent expressions of this populism, including the Posse Comitatus
movement, Willis Carto’s Populist Party, and the “Patriot”/militia movement of
the 1990s, have been largely relegated to fringe status. However, there have
been periods in America’s past when right-wing populism was not thoroughly
mainstream but also politically ascendant. Probably the most exemplary of these
was during the wave of Ku Klux Klan revival between 1915 and 1930.

This Klan crumbled in
the late 1920s under the weight of internal political warfare and corruption;
many of its field organizers later turned up in William Dudley Pelley’s overtly
fascist Silver Shirts organization of the 1930s. After World War II, most of
these groups – as well as the renowned anti-Semite radio preacher Father
Charles Coughlin, and lingering American fascist groups like George Lincoln
Rockwell’s American Nazi Party – were fully relegated to fringe status. So,
too, were subsequent attempts at reviving right-wing populism, embodied by
Willis Carto and his Populist Party, as well as other forms of right-wing
populism that cropped up in the latter half of the century, from Robert
DePugh’s vigilante/domestic terrorist organization The Minutemen in the 1960s,
to the Posse Comitatus and “constitutionalist” tax protesters in the 1970s and
‘80s, to the “militia”/Patriot movement of the 1990s. As it had been since at
least the 1920s, this brand of populism was riddled with conspiracist paranoia,
xenophobic white tribalism, and a propensity for extreme violence.

Yet beginning in the 1990s, as mainstream conservatives built more and more
ideological bridges with this sector – reflected in the increasing adoption of
far-right rhetoric within the mainstream – the strands of populism became more
and more imbedded in mainstream-conservative dogma, particularly the deep,
visceral, and often irrational hatred of the federal government. One of the
more popular "mainstream" figures among this bloc in the 1990s was
Rep. Ron Paul of Texas. And so when he created something of a sensation with his
campaign for the Republican nomination in 2008, it meant that these ideas and
agendas started receiving widespread circulation among the mainstream Right --
and with it, an increasing number of conservatives who called themselves
"libertarians", when what they really meant was
"populists."

But if Ron Paul opened the door for right-wing populism, though, he scarcely
could have anticipated the overnight political star who would, in short order,
come waltzing through it to great fanfare – namely, Sarah Palin. Hers is a
somewhat different, more mainstream-friendly brand of right-wing populism – and
as a result, it was embraced by a significantly greater portion of the American
electorate.

Her populism emerged
for national view shortly after John McCain announced her as his running mate.
It was more than just the aggressive, McCarthyite attacks on Obama as a
“radical” who “palled around with terrorists” and the paranoid bashing of
“liberal elites” -- most of all, there was the incessant suggestion that she
and McCain represented “real Americans” and were all about standing up for “the
people.”

Populism, yes, but indisputably right-wing, too: socially and fiscally
conservative, business-friendly, and hostile to progressive causes. The Producerist
narrative was a constant current in Palin’s speeches, particularly when she
would get the crowd chanting, “Drill, baby, drill!”

The populism whipped up by Palin’s candidacy became manifest
as a national movement in short order with the rise of the Tea Party in 2009.
Indeed, not only was the Tea Party overtly a
right-wing populist movement, it soon became a major conduit for a revival
of the 1990s version of this populism, the
“Patriot”/militia movement. Many of these Tea Partiers are now the same
Oath Keepers and “III Percenters” whose members widely support Trump’s
candidacy.

Of course, most of these extremists are only one step
removed, ideologically speaking, from the neo-Nazis and other white
supremacists of the racist right, and both of those segments of the right lean
heavily on nativist and authoritarian rhetoric. And there really is no other
good word for Trump’s rhetoric, and the behavior of many of his followers, than
“fascistic.” So it’s only somewhat natural that Trump’s right-wing populism
would be mistaken for fascism – they are, after all, not just kissing cousins,
but more akin to siblings. Not every right-wing populist is a fascist, but every fascist is a right-wing populist.

All of which underscores the central fact: Donald Trump may
not be a fascist, but his vicious brand of right-wing populism is not just
empowering the latent fascist elements in America, he is leading a whole nation
of followers merrily down a path that leads directly to fascism.

Consider, if you will, what did occur in the immediate
aftermath of Trump’s remarks about “roughing up” Black Lives Matter protesters:
Two nights later, a
trio of white supremacists in Minneapolis invaded a Black Lives Matter
protest there and shot five people, in an act that had been carefully planned
and networked through the Internet.

What this powerfully implies is that Trump has achieved that
kind of twilight-zone level of influence where he can simply demonize a target
with rhetoric suggestive of violent retribution and his admirers will act out
that very suggestion. It’s only a step removed from the fascist leader who
calls out his paramilitary thugs to engage in violence.

America, thanks to Trump, has now reached that fork in the
road where it must choose down which path its future lies – with democracy and
its often fumbling ministrations, or with the appealing rule of plutocratic
authoritarianism, ushered in on a tide of fascistic populism. For myself, I
remain confident that Americans will choose the former and demolish the latter
– that Trump’s candidacy will founder, and the tide of right-wing populism will
reach its high-water mark under him and then recede with him.

What is most troubling, though, is the momentum that Trump’s
candidacy has given that tide. He may not himself lack any real ideological
footing, but he has laid the groundwork for a fascist groundswell that could
someday be ridden to power by a similarly charismatic successor who is himself
more in the mold of an ideological fascist. And it doesn’t take a very long
look down the roll of 2016 Republican candidates to find a couple of candidates
who might fit that mold.

Trump may not be fascist, but he is empowering their
existing elements in American society; even more dangerously, his Tea Party
brand of right-wing populism is helping them grow their ranks, along with their
potential to recruit, by leaps and bounds. Not only that, he is making all this thuggery and ugliness seem normal. And that IS a serious problem.

Sara Robinson has worked as an editor or columnist for several national magazines, on beats as varied as sports, travel, and the Olympics; and has contributed to over 80 computer games for EA, Lucasfilm, Disney, and many other companies. A native of California's High Sierra, she spent 20 years in Silicon Valley before moving to Vancouver, BC in 2004. She currently is pursuing an MS in Futures Studies at the University of Houston. You can reach her at srobinson@enginesofmischief.com.